


The Grand Tableau

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Animal Death, Community: spook_me, Dubious Consent, Horror, M/M, Suicide, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 17:45:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5099891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A run of grisly murders, and the visit of an Eastern European professor to Cascade, are of course related. A vampire story with an unhappy ending.</p><p>Please check out the tags before you decide to read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There is really no excuse for this. It's a wallow in misery porn. Read the tags before you read the story, please.
> 
> This is written in two sections because despite being quite clear in my head it's been a slow write and I really want to fit it into the official Spook Me community deadline. It will be finished, and in the not too distant future. (This has actually ended up as four chapters because it developed into a longer story than I expected. How unusual....)

There was nowhere right through the building that wasn’t smeared with blood, and Blair swallowed convulsively beside Jim.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be this bothered, I know it’s mainly animals, but this is freaky.”

“Yeah,” Jim said distantly, because freaky was exactly what it was. The sole human body lay in a room further down the complex, surrounded by forensic techs, but the animal corpses lay scattered everywhere. Dogs. Cats. One chicken left on top of a storage cabinet like a saggy, forgotten stuffed toy. A Doberman, stretched out and stiff with rigor, its staring eyes as open as the torn out throat.

“What the hell is this? I mean, what the hell?” Blair’s shoulders were hunched, and his hands were jammed into his pockets. The white, heavy paper booties they both wore might be keeping the scene safe but were only barely going to spare their shoes. Blair visibly recoiled at a tiny headless kitten lying right at eye level. “How do you do something like this?”

“You mean morally, or technically, Chief?” Jim had kept it together at some distressing scenes, but there was something quietly panicky sitting in his gut. Outside, having lengthy hysterics in a patrol car, was the animal shelter manager who’d discovered the scene. Thirty-five cats and dogs (and one chicken), and let’s not forget the very eager, animal loving volunteer who often stayed late and had her own key. All of them dead, and all of them looking like they’d been mauled by something big, and vicious, and possessed of ferociously sharp teeth or claws. How _did_ something like this happen? What exactly had been let loose inside this building?

“What do you mean, technically?” Blair’s voice was rising. “You’re looking at a slaughterhouse, and you’re thinking about technique?”

“If you’re going to lose it, go outside,” Jim said. He didn’t look at Blair, but he felt his friend’s gaze on him, running over his skin like fever chills. Blair grabbed at Jim’s forearm, wrapped in its leather sleeve, and gripped it like a man caught in the tension of electric shock.

“Sorry. Sorry.” A deep, slow breath, and then Blair let of Jim’s arm, peeling his fingers away slowly and reluctantly. “So, technique. That’s important. You know the how, you get closer to knowing the who, right?”

“You mentioned a slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouses involve blades. But all of these…. I’ve seen animal bites. One of Incacha’s people – he lost a fight with a jaguar. Permanently. And there was a girl who startled a caiman and was lucky to live to tell the story. You can make a mess with an edged weapon, or an axe, or whatever but this….”

“You can tell the difference?”

Jim tried to find a smile, and offered it up to his friend. “Walking crime lab, remember.” The murmur of professionals at work rose louder. “You probably don’t want to follow me past here, Chief. I’ll be okay.”

Blair nodded, and stopped. Jim took the last few steps around the corner and walked through the airlock-style gate system that would have kept the animals safely contained while the shelter staff did their work, and into the cage complex where the dogs were kept. There were dogs here, yes, huddled in the corner of cages that had gates hanging askew from broken hinges. At the end of the corridor between the cages was the huddle of staff, wrapped in coveralls.

“A Jags cap does not count, Detective Ellison,” Serena said sharply. Her face was drawn. A murder scene was always bad, but the horde of animals who kept the human victim company in death added an element of uncanny that had left everyone on edge.

“I’m not going to come any closer until you’re done. The question is when you’ll be done.”

Serena sighed. “Your timing is good, actually, Jim. We’re just about ready for the Coroner’s wagon.” A couple of Forensics people gathered up their gear and walked past Jim, past the dog corpses. Serena followed them. “Sorry about the turf war moment. Weird sets me off, and this one is weird all right.”

Jim nodded. “I know. I’ll check back with you at Central, okay.”

“Yeah, sure. There’ll be pretty pictures to renew your memory, just in case you forget any of this.” Her hand swept around to encompass the mess of the enclosures, and then she left, her footfalls quiet in their soft booties.

Jim stepped forward to look at the dead woman on the floor; her name was Diane Sheldon. Her curly, shoulder-length grey hair was matted with blood. She wore a pair of shabby, grey sweat pants and a dark blue sweater, and aside from one missing shoe her clothing was undisturbed. Jim hoped that the promise that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted would be fulfilled. It was the only promising thing about the scene. She was sprawled against the wall, as if she’d been sitting and then had slumped down. Her inner arms were a mess, ripped from wrist to elbow. Jim was regrettably familiar with how a scene looked when people bled out onto the floor or the ground. There was plenty of blood, sure, but there should have been more. 

“You’re a puzzle, Diane,” he told the woman softly. He used his sight with a clinical detachment that he had to work for this time round and then crouched bedside her. No heartbeat here. Reflexively, Jim cast his hearing behind him, seeking and finding Blair’s heart, which ran a little fast and hard right now. “Can’t blame you for that, Chief,” Jim said and braced himself and inhaled. He had a reasonable chance of immediately confirming that their perpetrators hadn’t added rape to murder, and it was suddenly stupidly important to know right now that there was a limit to the violations here.

There was something in the air that choked him once he let himself smell it. All the blood here, the remains of the animals, had made him keep everything dialled right down, but now that he needed to be able to register something, his throat spasmed and he coughed frantically. He lost his balance for a moment, one gloved hand hitting the filthy floor, but at least he stayed on his feet. He stood, leaning against the wire of one of the pens, trying to cover his mouth while he hacked and gagged.

“Jim. Hey, Jim, are you okay?” It was Blair, cautiously peering around the door. “Oh, man,” he muttered in disgust. Jim turned away from the remains of Diane Sheldon and uselessly flapped his hands at Blair, unable to tell him to stay back. He whooped in a breath and swallowed back the pooling saliva in his mouth.

“Jim?” Blair asked again.

“Yeah, I’m okay, I’m okay.” He drew some slow, careful breaths in through his nose. “You don’t need to come any closer.”

 

“What set you off?” A small shiver ran over Blair’s body. “What couldn’t set you off?” he muttered to himself. “What do you need to filter out, Jim? Just separate it out and ignore what you don’t need to know, okay?”

Jim turned to look back at the pathetic body at the end of the room, and tried again. It was no good. Something curled against the back of his throat, toxic and sharp as smoke. He could smell nothing, or he could smell that, and he shut down his sense of smell as he tried to calm the second batch of coughing.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here.” Blair took some ginger steps into the room and Jim strode out towards the door, so that Blair didn’t have to get any closer. He put his hands on Blair’s shoulders and forcibly turned him and pushed him out the door. They pressed themselves against the wall in the hallway, watching as a couple of guys pushed a gurney with a body bag neatly laid out on the top past them. Then they headed out into the cold autumn air, fresh and clean and cold. For once, Blair wasn’t inclined to complain about the temperature. He lifted his face to the cloudy sky and took several deep breaths before he stripped off the gloves and the heavy paper booties. “So, what was going on in there, Jim?”

Jim finished binning his own gloves and boots, and then turned to look at the shelter complex. “Damned if I know. There was something in there, something I could register by smelling it, but that’s as far as it gets. Couldn’t tell you what it was, just that it made me feel like I was going to choke.”

“Gas of some sort? Maybe? I mean, some of those dogs were big, and they would have been freaked and dangerous because it would take time to do what they did – well, whatever they did in there. It would take time, wouldn’t it? So they might need something to calm some of the bigger dogs down. Right?” Blair’s voice was very deep – the growl of a man riding hard on his control.

“Maybe. Somebody will have to check out the animals too, I guess. I’ll mention that, somebody can do some pharmacology scans. Something might show up.”

Blair nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Look, I’m sorry, I have an afternoon lecture….”

“You’ll be okay?” Jim looked Blair over – he looked pale, and shaken.

“I – uh – I think so. Should be okay. Routine, something mundane.” A nervy, unconvincing grin appeared on Blair’s face. “Putting the fear of academia into some snot-nosed under-grads should be boringly soothing, if nothing else.” He took a couple of steps away, and then apparently changed his mind, and put one hand tight on Jim’s shoulder.

“You?” he asked. “You’ll be okay too?”

Jim nodded. “Just another day at the Major Crimes office, Chief. Go. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

Blair lifted his hands – a gesture of good-bye, of attempted dismissal of the scene in the shelter. “Yeah. See you tonight.” His gaze turned towards the buildings. “Good luck.”

The afternoon was a frustrating morass of investigation. Down the rabbit hole and no end in sight, Jim thought wearily. He came out of the situation room that had been set up, to a bullpen that was relatively quiet. Henri was typing notes, his face tired but set in polite attention, while a woman beside him, whose name Jim had forgotten, explained her concern over a developing missing person’s case. There was no official investigation yet, in part because the missing were mainly homeless and the woman, Abby Gaines, that was her name, was a welfare worker for one of the outreach organisations that worked with Cascade’s street people. But she knew Henri socially, and Jim had seen Henri and Simon both wear serious expressions talking about Abby Gaines’s concerns.

Jim pinched the bridge of his nose. Just what Cascade needed, on top of their current workload. When he headed home, it was past eight o’clock, and the local news had made their media meal of the shelter murder. Jim stepped into the loft and the smell of baked potatoes.

“Hey,” Blair said, looking up from the kitchen table and a pile of papers. “I did a late dinner, because to be honest I didn’t feel that hungry anyway. Baked potato, figured I’d poach some fish, there’s salad with a good tasting dressing if the white food sounds a little bland. Bland sounded good to me.”

Jim smiled. “Yeah, sure, Chief. Bland is good for tonight.”

“So I guess it’s all still a hell of a mess?”

“Nobody’s appeared to confess yet, no,” Jim said drily. “And I haven’t been inspired either, and we’ll be waiting on the lab reports a couple of days.”

“I’ve been trying to work out what happened with your senses back there. Last time you had a reaction like that we were talking sewers, and I mean, yeah, the crime scene smelled, but-“

Jim held up a hand. “Sandburg….” He made an effort to soften his voice. “Do you mind if we just stick with the bland, tonight? Have our dinner and put something on the stereo and just… not think?”

Blair winced in apology. “Yeah, sure. Those potatoes are pretty close to done, I’d better get going with the fish. That guy, the one who sells out of his van, he was down on the parking lot on Fremont Street, and you raved about that rockfish we got that one time. And I’ve got some lemon….”

Jim put some music on the stereo, and let soothing sound run through him.

He still woke from a nightmare at about two in the morning, running through a river of blood in downtown Cascade; the blood was warm and hit his face as his feet kicked up splashes, while poor Diane Sheldon threw sticks for a Rottweiler dog that bounded unconcerned in front of them.

~*~  
They went back to the shelter the next morning – Blair insisted, and in the light of the new day, Jim was ready to think about the case again. The shelter stank. Not all the animal corpses were gone yet, although the ones in the office and staff areas had been removed, to Blair’s plain relief. It was still a crime scene, and the cleaners and decorators that the building would need weren’t engaged yet. It stank; of course it stank, it was an animal shelter and the blood was bothersome, but that was it. The smell that had so distressed Jim’s senses was gone, evaporated into nothing.

“You’re sure?” Blair asked, in some surprise.

Jim shut his eyes a moment, and sought patience. “Given the reaction I had yesterday? Yes, I’m sure. It’s not something you can miss. Everything that’s left is pretty… organic.”

“So, then, maybe the gas theory is right. Something that’s literally volatile in some way.”

“We’ll wait on the lab reports.”

“Not words I get used to hearing when you’re around,” Blair said, with a small smile.

“Science has its uses, Chief. Let’s get back to the car.”

In the car, Blair pulled a sheaf of papers from his back pack, along with his glasses and a pen with bright, cobalt-blue ink, and started scribbling for all he was worth.

Jim cast him a look, and noted with some amusement that Blair looked a little shifty. “What have you got there, Sandburg? Porn?”

“Um, actually it’s maybe a potential primary sentinel source?”

“On photocopies? Wow, advanced.”

Blair laughed at that. “Oh, you smartass. It’s from a book that’s been published recently. A guy from Hungary, actually he’s apparently Romanian but living in Hungary, and he’s been doling out these amazing sources and interpretations – he has access to this ancient library in some ancestral castle or some such bullshit. People in several fields are going bananas over this guy, but he’s playing it close to his chest, setting up…” Blair paused, but not for long. “It’s almost like a salon. He’s not attached to any university, but he’s got money to burn and when he brings these primary materials out, they’re clearly genuine. Some people are getting pissed off that he won’t permit access and other people are just sitting at his feet waiting for the titbits to drop, you know?”

“You finished?” Jim asked, with gently fake concern. “You don’t need, oxygen? A glass of water?”

“Haha. He’s in Cascade, giving some lectures. He’s here under the auspices of Doctor McGuire in History, but everyone’s joining in. There’s a mixer tonight, and I wrangled an invite.”

“To talk about sentinels?” Jim asked, more sharply than he’d intended.

“Chill, man.” Blair looked at Jim over his glasses. “ I’ve got notes up the wazoo on mythical approaches to heightened senses. We can talk about this whole thing in principle forever, which is the whole point anyway, that Professor Balan, this guy, has got references going back to early medieval times. Your name will never come up, because this is about sentinels, not about Jim Ellison.”

Jim shrugged, somewhat reassured. “That’s okay, then, I guess.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Blair said firmly and then sighed. “It’s better to think about Balan than this case. Sorry.” Blair sounded genuinely apologetic.

“I can’t blame you for that, Sandburg.” Downtown Cascade was passing by outside the car. “This is a shitty case.”

It stayed a shitty case through the course of the day, a shitty case with no leads, and Blair vanished for Ranier at five o’clock - “library time , before the mixer” – while Jim did stuff at the PD that was essentially futile. He headed home in no good mood, and it was rising ten o’clock when Jim looked up from tired tv channel surfing to see that Blair finally returned home. He stank of something powerfully tobacco-based.

“Sandburg, do me a favour and put your coat out on the balcony will you? I’m going to smell that all night otherwise.”

“Yeah, sorry, sorry, I wondered if it would be a problem. Professor Balan smokes cigars, or cigarillos, something like that.”

“So you got your conversation?” Jim asked, regretting his first snappish response. But Blair’s clothing did really stink, not just the coat.

Blair jettisoned both his coat and his sweater, laying them over a chair on the balcony. He came back in and put water in his kettle and set it on the stove top.

“Yeah, yeah, I did. It was interesting and annoying at the same time.”

“Oh?”

“Well, this guy…” Blair sorted through his tea bag selection. “Intelligence, charisma, oh my god has he got charisma, but I think he’d be a son of a bitch to work with. He’s got a couple of affectations, the cigars, whatever they are, some of his mannerisms and he just does not give a shit, unless he chooses. You know the type?”

“Sons of bitches all,” Jim said. “But they often have something that you need.”

“Yeah.” Blair turned around, and his face was lit with rueful delight. “He’s willing to discuss sentinels again, he’s in Cascade a couple more days. So I guess I can put up with a charismatic asshole for the sake of my study.”

An odd pang of feeling twisted through Jim.

“Gotta suffer for science, eh, Chief?”

Blair grinned at that. “More material that’s not just Jim Ellison. That has to be good news for you, surely?” He came to the sofa with his tea, and sat there, knees drawn up tight against his body. Jim looked across at him and saw something in Blair’s face that he didn’t quite know what to make of. Uncertainty, and a depth of affection that made him look away again, as unsure as Blair. “At least I don’t suffer when I’m working with you.” Blair laughed after that, a nervous stutter.

Jim smiled. “Glad to hear it.”

Blair sipped his tea, just the once. It was still too hot. Jim could have told him that. “And the case – it’s not bothering you? I mean, more than normal?”

“No more than normal.” Jim looked Blair in the face once more. “And you?”

Blair shrugged. “I have a distraction. You have the fucking tv.”

“Bad cases come, Sandburg, and they either get solved or they don’t. It’s early days on the investigation. If either of us gets any bright ideas then we’ll go for it when it happens.”

“Yeah.” Blair sipped at his tea. “I think I’ll leave this. I can always heat it up in the microwave, right, and my hair must smell too. I’ll take a shower.”

“Yeah, sure, Chief.”

Blair went into the bathroom, and Jim turned off the television and went to bed. He even slept right through, but still woke at around 5.30. That damned dream of Diane Sheldon, and the street full of blood. Only this time she was throwing the stick to a wolf.

It was a good thing he was awake anyway. He got an urgent call from Simon calling him out to another murder scene, and left a note for Blair on the kitchen counter and went.

~*~

Blair had lectures in the morning (it was why Jim had let him sleep when he got Simon’s call) and when he turned up at the PD just before lunch Jim watched him come in, and watched his awareness of the atmosphere in the bullpen break on his face. Blair arrived at his desk and dragged up a chair, his face coming close to Jim as he murmured, “So something bad has happened. Your case?”

Jim shook his head. “Yes and no. It’s a brand new set of murders. Abby Gaines’s five missing homeless people were found stacked like so much cordwood in a quiet corner of an old warehouse. Throats cut on all of them.”

“Oh for…” Blair leaned the back of his hand against his mouth. “Are you on this case as well?”

“Yeah, but H is primary.” Jim rubbed one hand tiredly against his face.

“You said yes. Yes and no, about this being your case.”

“Like I said, they were stacked like cordwood. And when they unstacking them, I caught a whiff of whatever I smelled at the shelter. It didn’t set me off, and I still can’t tell you what it is, exactly, but I still knew it was the same.”

“Damn it,” Blair said.

“That’s one way of putting it. I’ve told Simon. He’s delighted, of course.”

“Oh, of course.”

Jim knocked his knuckle over the top of his desk in frustration. “They’re still waiting on legal identification of most of the victims. Abby Gaines is pretty upset.”

“Well, hey, at least it gives Henri the chance to be comforting, right?” They exchanged a look. Henri’s interest in the woman had not exactly gone unnoticed.

 

“Tends to give a bad impression if you can’t catch the bad guys, Chief.” Jim stood. “I’ve got to go and talk to Dan. You want to come, or do you maybe want to do some of my filing?”

Blair swallowed. “Do you need me there?” he asked staunchly, and Jim was overwhelmed with fondness. 

“No, no, Sandburg. Do the filing, or check your own damn notes. I won’t be that long.”

~*~  
Abby Gaines had broken down identifying the victims. She’d known them all, and apparently had a particular fondness for one old guy who’d been known on the streets as Al Fresco. It had been a depressing day. Diane Sheldon’s body had been released to her family, a brother and sister who’d been devastated. There were no leads worth a damn, and everyone in Major Crimes was taking deep metaphorical breaths and reminding themselves of whatever cliché about perseverance and time that comforted them.

Jim had a beer with the guys after work. Sandburg was out seeing his Professor with the sentinel sources and the loft was empty without him. It was a melancholy group of men without any answers who sat around in the bar on Fennimore Street and watched the local news channel go berserk over Cascade’s recent spate of homicides.

“Okay, ladies. Tomorrow is another day,” Jim said, and stood to make his farewells. Simon nodded, Joel and Henri saluted him with their glasses. Rafe said and did nothing. He’d had the most alcohol of them all, and Jim had seen Simon look at him with concern.

Out on the street, Jim took in a breath of his city’s air – cold, and not particularly sweet, but fresher than the bar. My city, Jim thought, suddenly fiercely angry with whoever had killed innocents and put fear into the rest of the people here.

He drove home, and was getting ready for bed when the phone went. It was eleven o’clock at night, and Jim went to answer it, thinking that he’d almost welcome an embarrassed Blair with a story of a flat tyre, rather than Simon’s voice.

“Mr Ellison?” It wasn’t anyone he knew. The voice was very cultured, definitely European without quite being English, and it rumbled deep in a way that reminded Jim uncomfortably of a beast growling.

“Yes,” he snapped, bothered by his reaction and terse as a result.

“My name is Constantin Balan, your friend Blair Sandburg is visiting my hotel.”

“Yes, yes, the professor that Sandburg wanted to see. I remember.” Blair would be rolling his eyes at Jim’s discourteous tone right now, but this man’s voice was unsettling as hell, and Jim had learned to trust his instincts.

“Sadly, Mr Sandburg has been taken ill. Not so unwell as to need emergency services, but certainly not well enough to make his own way home. He hopes that he can impose on you to come and collect him?”

“What’s wrong with him? I want to speak to him.”

“One of my friends offered Blair a…. herbal remedy. He’s fast asleep, poor man. I have what the Cascade Grande Hotel is pleased to call their Executive Luxury suite. Someone will wait on your arrival.”

“Wait a minute!” Jim said, but the dial tone was his only answer. Balan had hung up. “Son of a bitch,” Jim muttered. Normally, Jim didn’t put on his holster and his gun to collect Sandburg from some academic soiree, but for this occasion he’d make an exception.

The Cascade Grande had a separate elevator for clients using their top floor suites, and Jim had an excellent view of his pale, tense face as he rode ever upwards in its marbled and mirrored interior. The doors opened on a broad hallway, painted in refined creams and golds and carpeted in royal blue. The noise coming from the end of the hallway was anything but refined. Loud music (somebody liked swing) and raucous laughter swirled towards Jim. Jim inhaled cautiously, already on alert, and half expecting to get a snoot full of marijuana. Instead, that same, smoky, harsh scent from the shelter filled his nose and throat, and he nearly coughed himself into vomiting before he recovered himself and forced his sense of smell all the way down.

Options passed through his mind with cold, slow motion precision, but in the end there was only one choice. He took his gun in his hands and walked down the corridor. The music had stopped, and the noise hadn’t stopped, but had settled to a hum, like the buzz of an auditorium before a show. How many people were in there? Jim caught a multitude of heart beats – oddly heavy and slow – so twenty people at least. Twenty people, and at least one of them caught up in the shelter killing, and almost certainly the dead homeless, too.

But Blair was in there. Jim couldn’t hear his heart among the multitude, couldn’t smell him without gagging on that other poisonous scent, but he was there, he was bait, maybe, and that was just too fucking bad. Jim couldn’t leave him there.

He was barely facing the door when it opened, and Jim swung his gun up, the opposite wall at his back.

“Mr Ellison. Or should I call you Detective Ellison. Or Enqueri? Would that be an acceptable title?” The man in the doorway wasn’t particularly tall, but he was almost angelic in appearance – pale-faced and dazzlingly blond. His face had broad, square lines reminiscent of Blair’s, but caught in malicious curiosity, and his eyes were dark. “I’m Constantin Balan,” the man said winningly. “Please, do come in.”

“I don’t think so. Why don’t you wake Sandburg up and bring him out here.”

Balan’s smile widened, stretching inhumanly broadly across his face. “But I insist. Come in, Jim. We’re waiting on you.” Balan didn’t move from the doorway, but something, a wisp of smoke, a gust of wind, a shadow, moved past him and in a split-second of shocking movement Jim was disarmed and caught in the hold of two young women. They were petite, and smiling as if anticipating a special event, and each took an arm and a leg and hauled Jim through the too narrow door like Jim was a child, as Balan stepped back and mockingly waved them past, an arch and unlikely doorman. Jim’s captors deposited him on his knees before a dais, perhaps a foot high, set at one end of the room. Behind the dais a door led somewhere else in the suite. Around Jim was the crowd of people his hearing had led him to expect, and an air of partying without any of the usual detritus, except for a haze of cigarette smoke. There was no food, no wine glasses, no beer bottles. Only this expectant, excited group of people, who looked like they should be pictured in a Hollywood magazine. All of them, men and women, were young and attractive, and beautifully dressed when they weren’t picturesquely dishevelled.

Jim struggled under the hands that pressed him down. One of the young women, an elfinly beautiful woman with a mass of dark curling hair dressed with gems, knelt beside him and held onto him with less effort than a young mother might have held her tantrumming child.

“Hush, Jim,” she murmured. “Patience, darling.” Her lipstick was a pretty, pearlescent pink to match the nails that dug into Jim’s shoulder, and the stench of her breath reached Jim’s senses despite his earlier efforts to dial down. Jim turned his head away. That much he could do. The other woman knelt behind him, her legs astride Jim’s, and her weight oppressive against his back. She licked his neck, and Jim shuddered.

“Constantin, are you sure?” she asked plaintively. “He’s yummy.”

Balan’s presence was a force that Jim felt even without his sight. “What did I tell you, Kitty? I have a grand tableau set up, and you are not to disarrange a single thing.” He sounded indulgent, but Jim could feel goose pimples ride the woman’s skin, and he fiercely tried to control what his senses registered. That rumbling timbre of Balan’s voice, so out of synch with his appearance, set off a panic that not even the uncanny strength of the women had triggered.

Balan stood up on the dais. “Dear children,” he called, lifting his arms in the air with a preacher’s triumphal grace, “we are nearly at the apex, the climax dare I say, of this evening’s entertainment. A hand for our players, please.”

The crowd whooped and cheered like they were barracking for a winning sports team. “We have Jim. A sentinel, a treasure of the earth, and not to be molested, children.” He bent down, looking not at Jim but at the two women. “Kitty, Amelie, I hope that you’re not bruising him,” he said roguishly. The crowd erupted into laughter. With a flourish, Balan gestured back at the door behind him. “And our second player, waiting so patiently. Blair, come out!”

The door opened and Blair stepped onto the dais. He was naked; not so much as the earring in his ear was left, and his hair hung free, veiling his face. Jim tried to move. His body writhed and flinched in the hold of two delicate-seeming young women, but movement? Action? No.

“Look up, Blair,”Balan commanded. “Look up and let us see you.”

Blair’s head jerked up like an old-time movie animation, jerky and not quite real. His eyes stared out over the crowd and then met Jim’s with empty despair. Jim could see his skin creeping, never still, always a shiver unsettling his body. 

“Take my hand,” said Balan.

“Sandburg! No!” Jim’s voice cracked, part horror, part his body’s growing inability to block his awareness of the scent in the room. He didn’t want to taste or breathe this air. It was polluted and unnatural and Jim’s body revolted at the necessity.

Blair hesitated, and Balan grinned. “Stubborn, aren’t you.” His voice dropped into something that was barely sound, and that Jim registered more as vibration than noise. “Take my hand.” Blair’s shivering grew more pronounced, but he stepped forward and took Balan’s hand. Balan smiled in obscene delight, a father seeing a child take its first steps, and then took Blair in his arms like a lover and tilted him back and put his mouth to Blair’s throat.

Jim had excellent sight. Blair had notes, so many, handwritten, computer files, all of them laying out how perfect and excellent Jim’s sight was. So Jim saw very clearly the way that Balan’s mouth worked to open a wound in Blair’s throat, how Balan sucked and swallowed long gulping mouthfuls of Blair’s blood. So much. How much did the body hold, how many pints were being chugged like beer at a drunken frat party?

Jim couldn’t move. He tried, oh god, he tried, but they held him tight. Disassociation. There was a small, cold part of him that noted the room, the events, the faces around him, even while he hurt himself trying to move, and screamed himself hoarse calling Blair’s name.

Balan stood straight, Blair limp in his arms. His face was bloodied and bright eyed. “Children,” he boomed. “Your new brother offers you his blessing!” The muscles of his stomach and throat worked, and a gout of blood, bright and glistening, vomited from Balan’s mouth. He pivoted, spraying the crowd, which bayed its joy. Some of the blood, still warm, hit Jim, spattering his face and his clothes.

All around him hearts beat oddly slow and steady, for all the excitement of the room. The only fast heartbeat was Blair’s. His ‘blessing’ exhausted, Balan leaned down to Blair’s throat once again, and this time Blair moved. Not to escape, but one hand reached up and out, stretching towards Jim, pleading and desperate, taut, the fingers splayed out.

“I’m here,” Jim said. “I’m here, Blair, I’m here…” He didn’t know if he kept speaking. Maybe. Jim was too busy watching, watching how Blair begged him to help with that one reaching hand. Jim was too busy listening to the way that Blair’s heart quickened, so fast, but weaker and weaker, and then Blair’s hand shook, flailing as if in a seizure even as the rest of him stayed in Balan’s grip, and then the hand dropped. Blair’s hand dropped, and Jim’s hearing struggled to follow the heartbeat, skipping now, so weak, so hard to follow, but Jim had to. He had to follow, he had to….

The next thing he knew, there was a woman screaming, a tall, raw-boned woman with dyed blonde hair caught back in a pony tail. She leaned on her cleaning cart and didn’t stop screaming. Jim’s body was stiff and sore, but he did his best to sit up. He wished she’d shut up. The suite was a hell of a mess, sure, but aside from Jim, there was nobody else in it. 

Nobody else at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim deals with the aftermath of Blair's disappearance and receives proof that he's still alive. This chapter earns the non-con warning. Approach at your own discretion. Choose not to warn is an additional warning in play at all times.
> 
> And yes, three chapters now. But definitely not more than three.

Jim looked up to see Simon standing grave-faced over his desk.

“You and I apparently have an appointment with Sheila Irwin in IA, Jim. Now,” Simon said pointedly when Jim opened his mouth to speak.

Jim sat still for a clenched-teeth moment and then stood. “Very good, sir,” was all he said.

The journey to Sheila Irwin’s office was silent. She stood to greet them, nodded, and gestured to the chairs in front of her desk. “Gentlemen.” She seated herself. Jim had to admire her poise. She was guarded, courteous and utterly correct. The thing that made him long to hit her was the barely visible hint of sympathy in her eyes.

“Detective Ellison,” she began. “I’ve given your captain the bare bones of this situation. Now it’s your turn. Would you care to explain why we’ve received a complaint about you from one of the witnesses in the case of the disappearance and probable murder of Blair Sandburg? Professor Harold Anderson has laid a complaint of harassment with the PD. He claims that you came into his office, called him a liar and behaved in a threatening and intimidating manner. In the course of the initial enquiry, we discovered that you had also approached Professor David McGuire, and while he made no specific complaint of you, he was concerned, and I quote, ‘at the tenor of the interview’.” She finished, and then, as Jim stayed silent, quietly said his name. “Jim?”

Jim found that he couldn’t look her in the eye. Too much shame, too much anger. “There’s nothing much to say. Yes, I approached Anderson and McGuire. Yes, I lost my temper with Professor Anderson. Yes, I’ll abide by whatever reprimand or punishment the department deems appropriate.”

Sheila looked at him. The grim sympathy was even more apparent, but her voice was cool and steady. “Do you further understand and acknowledge that as you are yourself a witness in this case and entirely unattached to the investigation that you should never have approached these gentlemen at all, with or without the use of Department credentials?” Jim nodded. “And is this all your comment on this situation?”

“Yes,” Jim said. His throat was tight so that it hurt to speak. “May I go?” Beside him, Simon sighed.

“There’ll be a more formal hearing about this, Detective Ellison. HR can advise you on what to expect, if you wish to approach them. You’ll be advised. For now, yes, you can go.”

Jim stood. It didn’t escape him that Simon made no move to stand himself. He left Sheila’s office and made his way back downstairs to Major Crimes and sat at his desk. He picked up a file and opened it and stared blindly at it. He waited perhaps twenty minutes before Simon returned to the bullpen and said tiredly, “My office, Jim.”

Simon shut the door behind them both and shut his blinds. Then he turned to face Jim, one hand passing across his face and jaw, and said, “I’d ask you what the hell you were thinking, but I already know. This is a hell of a mess.”

“I’m sorry.”

Simon’s eyes darkened in anger. “No, no you’re not. You have to get a grip on this. I know that this is hard, damn hard, but you’re risking a good career, a distinguished career, and damaging your reputation with too many people.”

Jim stood a little straighter, his chin lifting as he focused into a middle distance somewhere beyond Simon’s office and Simon’s concern and disappointment. “Sir.”

“Don’t try this bullshit with me, Jim. You have to let this go, at least for the nitty-gritty of the case investigation. And if you don’t, then I’ll call a mandatory psych evaluation on you as an adjunct to IA’s enquiry and let the chips fall where they may. I don’t want to do that, but I’m running out of options, and so are you.”

Jim sought for some convincing argument, something that would let Simon see it how Jim saw it. He could only tear at the same wound that he’d been reopening for the last three weeks. “They let that bastard go because of them!”

“They had no choice!” Simon roared. “When two eminent Rainier professors say that they spent the evening with Balan, when the staff at an entirely different hotel to the Cascade Grande have room service records and eyewitnesses, then yes, your testimony doesn’t count!” He lowered his voice, distress clear in his eyes. “Jim, how many times do we have to go over this? I attended their interviews myself, I took part in McGuire’s, I have gone over records with a fine tooth comb. There was no cause to hold Balan.”

“I was there, Simon.”

“Shocked, bruised, and possibly drugged, according to the ME, since nobody else can think of why you might have been unconscious for up to ten hours. And then you had to run off after Balan, AMA I might add, and chase him as far as New York! Plenty of the guys working the case think you spent that time covering your tracks and that you’re still their best suspect. You are skating dangerously close to being investigated for attempting to pervert the course of justice, let alone conduct unbecoming.” Simon took a deep breath. “Pull it back. Take some leave time. I’m sorry about Blair too, and I want to know what happened as much as you do. But you have got to get a grip, and some distance. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. To his horror, his voice trembled.

Simon rubbed one hand across the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension that must be there. “I’m telling you now, Jim. Take some leave. If you don’t, then I will put you on suspension, if IA doesn’t insist on it first.”

“Sir.”

“I’ll put you down for a minimum of two weeks leave. Now go home. Go home.” Simon opened the door for Jim and mournfully ushered him out.

The expressway route back to Prospect led across the back of the downtown district and the Cascade Grande cast a baleful shadow across Jim’s drive home. Balan had never been in that hotel, supposedly. He’d had a comfortable but far from sumptuous room at the Four Seasons, and had entertained Professors McGuire and Anderson there until well past midnight, and then ordered tea and a light snack at 1.30am. Jim’s hands tightened around the steering wheel, and his gut churned with sick fury. He remembered Blair’s shivering skin, and the profound power in Balan’s voice as he commanded Blair to do something that he plainly was terrified of doing. It was all so obscenely understandable. A psych evaluation? Jim would be on medical leave right now if he’d told everything he knew about why his clothes and skin, and the walls and floor of the Cascade Grande’s Executive Suite were spattered with Blair’s blood.

He was running out of options with the PD, and he’d been stupid with McGuire and Anderson. But Jim had money, and he had a wide variety of law and intelligence contacts. To find Balan, and Blair, he was just going to have to look a little further afield.

~*~  
Three months after Blair Sandburg went missing, Jim received a large, stiff envelope with French postage. It was addressed to him in what was obviously Blair’s handwriting. There was no return address. Inside the envelope, protected by a heavy cardboard backing was an eight by ten photograph. It was in colour. It depicted Blair, with four others. There were two women that Blair didn’t recognise, and Constantin Balan and the woman that Jim knew only as Kitty. They were all naked and looked to be taking time out from an orgy. Blair’s head leaned against Balan’s shoulder, and one of the unknown women sprawled between Blair’s spread legs, turning her head back to pucker a kiss towards the camera. Blair’s face was plain and clear, and his eyes were shut, but not in sleep, if the strained lines of his expression told for anything.

There had been mirrors in the room at the Cascade Grande. They’d reflected back jeering, laughing faces, and the swirl and sheen of expensive clothes. Scratch one myth off the list of things that folk lore had right about vampires. On the back of the photograph, also in Blair’s writing, was the legend “Wish you were here”.

Jim had put gloves on to open the envelope. Still wearing gloves, he took out a wooden chopping board and a box cutter and with great care sliced as much of Blair’s image out of the photograph as he could. Blair’s picture he tore up and burned. The remainder, the photograph and the envelope it came in, he placed into another envelope, which Jim addressed to a UK enquiry agency that he’d been advised had good European connections and contacts. He wrote a short covering letter. They already had the basics of his brief. He sealed it all and placed the envelope on the table by the door.

Then he opened a beer with shaking hands. He’d been expecting, hoping, for contact, and now he had it. He’d had meticulous plans, carefully thought through, and none of it had prepared him for that toxic package and the confirmation it brought. He stood out on the balcony and looked at the city lights, even though it was winter and cold as hell; he drank his beer and remembered times when Blair had been there to stand beside him. The city lights blurred and Jim plonked down on the wooden chair out there, shivering with cold, and aware that he felt way too weird for just one beer. He waited a while, trying to settle his body even though he knew that his body was only half of the problem. When he felt okay to get up again he went inside and poured the rest of the beer in the fridge down the sink, and the bottle of bourbon that he’d had sitting around for literally years, and the cheap scotch that Blair had used as an alcoholic comfort and ‘cure’ for colds. 

He couldn’t afford distractions. Not yet.

~*~  
Cascade’s weather was coyly and damply considering the possibility of spring when Jim received a small package, addressed to the Cascade Police Department, where Jim was garnering a reputation for being dogged but a goddamn son of a bitch since that ‘business with his friend’. It was marked personal, and delivered without comment by the young guy in Admin, who’d learned the hard way that Jim wasn’t interested in light-hearted comments about his mail.

If the package had been a toad unblinkingly watching Jim try to work, it might have unsettled him more, but probably not that much more. Jim finished early that afternoon and headed home, the package (the approximate size of a videotape) weighting his jacket pocket down like a stone. 

He didn’t know the handwriting and the postage was US this time, but there was no return address, and that alone was enough to stress Jim. Once inside the door of his home he didn’t bother to take his jacket off, but instead took a knife to the cardboard packaging and tore it apart. It was the videotape that the shape and size had promised, and with a pounding heart Jim put it into the player.

His first thought as he watched the playback was that he would kill Balan. He had to find the fucker, admittedly, but he _would_ kill him. 

Unlike the photograph, with its lewd, party snap atmosphere, this was intimate, and carefully lit to show the two men it featured to best advantage. They were Balan and Blair, of course. Of course. Jim clenched his hands, revolted and shoving down an insidious and unwilling arousal. Balan was fucking Blair, who was laid out on his back on a big bed in a setting of pale linen. Blair’s face was turned away from the camera, but he was unmistakable. Balan fucked Blair lazily and then, still keeping his rhythm, conversationally addressed the camera. “Good evening, Jim.” More pornographic display followed and then Balan spoke again.

“I’m about to ask Blair a few questions, and I want to emphasise to you that Blair is going to answer absolutely honestly.” He looked down at the man lying on the bed with him. “You’re going to be completely honest, aren’t you, Blair? No lies, no evasions. Just the unvarnished truth.”

Blair turned his head enough to be seen in profile and looked up at Balan. “Constantin. Don’t, please.” His voice shook, and Jim swallowed around the hard, hurting lump in his throat.

“Honesty. I command it, child.” Balan stopped moving, still deep inside Blair, and casually handled Blair’s dick. “Did you ever tell Jim about the fact that you’ve long regarded yourself as, how did you put it to Kitty, one quarter bi?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because Jim didn’t need to know!” God, Jim had heard that tone from Blair before, utter exasperation at stubborn stupidity, albeit mixed also with utter contempt. A hot, sick jolt of triumph ran through Jim, because that was clearly too much honesty for Balan. Balan’s face worked with quick fury, and he took his revenge with a vicious twist of Blair’s balls. Blair screamed, a high-pitched, bitten off noise, and his hard-on noticeably wilted. 

“Let us continue. Why didn’t you ever indicate a potential interest in men to Jim Ellison?”

Blair bit his lip so hard that Jim was surprised to not see blood.

“Was it because at first that he might have pulled the plug on your study?” Balan asked gently.

“Yes.”

Balan fucked Blair a little more, turning Blair’s face towards the camera with a mendacious tenderness. “But as you knew each other longer you knew he wouldn’t do that, but he might have thought less of you, so you still said nothing.”

“Yes.”

“It would be very hard to have Jim think less of you because you love him, don’t you?”

The hopeless litany continued. “Yes.” Blair had shut his eyes as Balan turned his face towards the camera.

“But you liked to entertain a little hope that Jim might return your interest, didn’t you? You would entertain a few fantasies in the privacy of your head.”

Blair had started to cry. Jim watched the screen with appalled fascination; his dick was half hard but the rest of him was numb.

“Yes.”

“Who would you really like to fuck you, Blair?” The numbness was replaced with frigid prickling over all of Jim’s skin. Blair’s humiliation hurt to watch but Jim didn’t have the strength to stop. He was nailed in place as thoroughly as Blair was nailed to that luxurious, filthy bed.

“Jim.” It was barely a whisper that caught in a gasp as Balan started handling Blair’s dick again. His head tossed – denial, pleasure, Jim couldn’t tell, and the tear tracks shone clear in the careful, flattering lighting.

“But you do like to fuck as well, don’t you? Who do you want to fuck? Who would you rather be with right now?”

“Jim.”

Balan’s widest, unhinged, inhuman smile was directed briefly at the camera, at Jim, before he leaned over Blair, almost covering him and said, straightforwardly as someone phoning for takeout, “We’re going to finish it now, you and I, and you’re going to think of Jim. You’re going to speak his name out loud, as loud as you need, until you come. You understand?”

A harsh, gagging noise came out of Blair’s throat. Then Balan bent fully down, and opened his mouth wide to grip and bite the side of Blair’s neck, forcing Blair to again face that fucking, evil camera. The picture drew into a closer view of Blair’s face, which changed at Balan’s mouthing of his neck. There was an operator behind the camera, another witness to this.

Pained lust dawned on Blair’s shut-eyed face. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, and then Jim’s name, over and over.

Jim was six months back in time, in that room at the Cascade Grande with Blair begging Jim for help, and Jim utterly helpless and sick with guilt and terror. With a broken cry, he finally stopped the playback and waited, shaking uncontrollably until the video player spat out the tape. Jim snatched it up, and broke off the tape guard without care for his nails and hooked his fingers into the tape and wildly drew it out, great ribbons of it caught in his hands and tangling around him. He stood there, and then hid his face in his hands. The crushed edges of the tape cut like razor blades against his palms, but there were flat surfaces too, snail-slime smooth. Jim took a shuddering breath, and the scent of stale food and unwashed laundry crept past the petrochemical scent of the tape. All of it invaded his sinuses and slid against his tongue. The next breath ended on a sob that rose up from his gut like vomit, more and more of them until he was exhausted.

He burned the ribbons of tape too.

~*~  
When Blair had first disappeared, Naomi came to Cascade, to follow the investigation. Jim had taken her out to dinner one night, to a modest but very good Thai place that had been a particular favourite of Blair’s. Jim had drunk too much and ended up abjectly and incoherently apologising to Naomi for failing to keep her son safe. He’d shut up only as he increasingly realised that he was on the brink of telling her everything that he’d seen – and everything was far too much, for too many reasons. She’d put him in a cab, and with surprising tact had never mentioned the matter again, neither to berate him nor to ‘validate’ his feelings. 

He kept in touch with her, passing on the basics of his efforts at enquiry, but keeping back his acid, creeping fury at how Constantin Balan melted like smoke from one address to another, sometimes findable, sometimes not. Investigators usually hid their own frustration behind a mask of professionalism although one woman angrily commented in an expensive phone call to Jim that she wasn’t entirely convinced that the Balan persona wasn’t some sort of hoax. It was certainly handy to have the power to cloud men’s minds, Jim concluded bitterly.

Naomi had followed his news eagerly for the first few months, but Jim wasn’t surprised that the last month or so had been quiet for them both. So the last thing he expected when he picked up his phone was to hear her voice.

“Naomi!” He spoke with a surprise that couldn’t have flattered her.

“Yes, indeed. How are you?”

“I’m doing okay.” He was lying, but whatever. “You?”

There was a brief pause and then she said, “I saw Blair today.”

Jim stood frozen, unsure for a moment (this was Naomi after all) if she meant literally, or if she’d had a vision from her guru or seen Blair in bong smoke. Then he gathered his self-possession and said, “Where are you?”

“I’ve been in Big Sur. A friend of mine runs a spa, I work for them when I’m here, and there was a knock on my door and I opened it and it was Blair!” She should have been overjoyed. Instead she sounded tentative and subdued, and Jim panicked for a moment that Blair hadn’t been alone, that some of Balan’s clique of fellow monsters had been there too.

“Are you all right?” he asked urgently.

She tittered, a weak, ragged noise that was nothing like the Naomi he knew. “I… don’t know. Oh, I should be so happy, my baby was right there in front of me, apologising for how scared I must have been, and explaining that he’d gotten away and that he’d come to see me as soon as he could.”

“Is he still there? Can I talk to him?” Jim shifted the receiver in a suddenly sweaty palm.

“No, no, he’s gone. He said he couldn’t stay long. He hugged me and we tried to talk but he was terribly evasive what happened to him, and then he left.” Her voice shook. “And I was glad, I was glad he left! I know you don’t share my beliefs about auras and the unseen, Jim, but he was so dark and all I could think was that he was wrong. My son was sitting next to me and I felt sick. How could I look at my boy and feel that instead of being glad he was safe?”

She wound down into silence.

“Naomi, maybe you should call your friends, and have them visit you, or go visit them. I don’t think you should be on your own right now.”

She laughed at that, shriller than he was used to from her. “I think you might be right. But I knew, I knew I should tell you. You and Blair were such good friends, and I know what happened was hard for you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “How long ago did he leave, Naomi?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was late at night when he called, after ten. He was gone before midnight.” And it was now eight o’clock in the evening of the day after.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Oh yes. I couldn’t sleep straight after he came. I tried to meditate, and then I tried to get drunk and then I did go to sleep and when I woke up I realised I should call you. And here I am.” It was a flat, sad imitation of Naomi’s usual light, flirtatious tones.

“Call your friends after you hang up.”

“What will I tell them?”

Something tore inside Jim and he said with rough impatience, “Tell them whatever the fuck you want!” He heard her indrawn breath. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m… I wasn’t expecting this.”

“No.” A long, speechless moment. “He mentioned you. He didn’t say it, but I can’t imagine… He’ll go to Cascade next.”

“Yes. I think you’re right. Take care, Naomi.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I will, and you do the same, Jim. Take care.” She hung up. Jim put down the phone and sat gracelessly on the couch.

Blair was coming. Jim sat in the heart of his home and thought about that with equal parts of anticipation and cold-sweat terror.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blair comes back to Cascade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised, didn't I? I promised that this would be only three chapters, but since this puppy has the chance of hitting 20k words... yeah. This section contains the dub-conny side of things. The promise of all the tags always lurks, and choose not to warn is in play, as ever.

Jim was down the low-rent end of the city district walking away from a contact with a witness in a robbery case that left a bad taste in his mouth when he saw the guy with the ponytail and the plaid jacket. He chased after him, and followed him down the street. It was fall again, and it had been raining. The lights, streetlights, neon signs, all reflected in the puddles, until Jim reached the mouth of an unlit alley. The dark was no barrier, but there was nothing. Maybe the click of a door, but he hadn’t been paying attention. “Sandburg?” he called. Nothing, not even the scurry of a rat.

“Get a grip, Ellison,” Jim muttered. He wrote up some notes in the truck, and headed in the direction of Prospect Avenue. All week he’d been on edge and he was jumping at shadows everywhere. There were two cheap restaurants on that dingy street alone, and plenty of men in Cascade wore plaid and long hair. It had probably been some dishwasher heading to work through the back door. But when Jim reached his home, that crawly, agitated feeling didn’t settle. If anything it worsened. Jim paced a while, and then he went out to the balcony again, and stared across the bay at the city lights defying the dark and the growing lateness of the hour. He took a breath of cold, damp air.

“Chief, if that’s you out there, then come on in.” Some small vestige of caution overcame the sense of ridiculousness, and he added, “Blair Sandburg. Nobody else.” There was no knock at the door – but there was a rustle of movement above, the scuff of shoes on concrete and brick, and Blair (Blair Sandburg, who didn’t really like heights all that much) swung down from the roof onto Jim’s balcony with breathtakingly casual grace.

“Hey, man,” he said, and walked inside.

Jim followed him, his eyes taking in everything that there was to see. Blair’s face had been pale and a little drawn. If he’d walked in the door looking like that, some time back a year or so ago, Jim would have assumed an irritating day explaining the realities of life to undergraduate students. Blair wore jeans and a dark blue sweater and a blue and black plaid jacket with a cream fleece lining. For a moment it was disorientingly as if the last year had never happened.

Blair turned. He had his hands stuffed in his pants pockets. His hair was tightly scraped back in a tail, and yes, he was actually irritated. Pissed, even.

“Good guess.”

Jim shrugged. His heart was beating fast enough to climb up his throat, or so it seemed, but his voice came out calmly. “Something was annoying me. Figured it had to be you, Chief.”

“No, I mean the invitation. How did you know?”

“Know what?” Jim asked, confused.

“Ah. You didn’t know. Brave but clueless.” Blair ignored Jim’s stunned, hurt silence, and continued, “Territory is a big thing. With – uh – vampires. I can’t trespass. I have to be invited. I had to ask my own mother if I could walk into her apartment, and she didn’t even know. You know exactly what I am, and you invite me right on in. Jesus, Jim!”

Jim recovered his voice. “And a good evening to you, too, Sandburg. Nice to see you again.” This wasn’t true, even putting aside Blair’s less than sentimental greeting. Knowing that it was Blair hadn’t settled Jim’s wary sense of threat. This was his friend standing in front of him, invited into Jim’s home, and there was a growing instinctual clamour in the back of his head that Jim should run, run now.

Blair had averted his eyes at Jim’s sarcasm. Now he stared at the wooden floors and said, “Yeah, nice to see you too.” He looked at Jim again. “It’s been a while.”

Jim nodded, wordless, and suddenly afraid to breathe, dialing down as hard and fast as he’d ever done in his life.

“Jim?” Blair asked. Understanding broke across his face. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. But it’s okay. Listen to me, Jim. Just listen to me, calm down and listen.” Jim nodded, and waited. “Sit down, sit down and listen.” It was soothing. The panic lessened and Jim sat. “You know, Jim, you would have done a lot of subconscious monitoring of me, you wouldn’t even have known it.” Even, careful tones, Blair explaining things, guiding Jim through what he needed to manage his senses, all of it so familiar. “You know what my baselines are, Jim. You know what Blair Sandburg sounds like, what he looks like, what he smells like. That’s who I am, Jim, it’s Blair, and I’m just the same as I ever was, okay? Take a few deep breaths, and look at me. It’s just me, Jim. It’s just Blair.”

Jim had shut his eyes. Now he opened them, and looked at Blair again, and it was better. He still knew what he was looking at, but it didn’t bother him anymore. It was only Blair.

“Better?” Blair asked. He looked distressed, but Jim knew there was no help for that.

“Yeah, yeah, thanks.”

“I thought this might happen. I mean, Mom, she went to hug me and I felt every muscle in her just tense. The rabbit doesn’t usually hug the wolf, you know?”

“Is that what you think we are? Rabbits?”

“You and Mom, personally?” A bitter smile spread across Blair’s face. “I guess it’s a little more complicated than that. But people in general? Yeah, sure.” He settled himself in the yellow armchair.

“That’s bullshit, Sandburg!”

Blair shook his head. “No it’s not. Courtesy of Constantin, I am totally an apex predator. Not alpha within my own circles, very much not alpha as a matter of fact, but don’t fool yourself about what I am, Jim. That would be stupid.”

That comforting suggestion that Blair was Blair, himself, familiar and safe, threatened to crack. “If you were like this with Naomi, no wonder she was scared of you.”

Blair shrugged unhappily. “I tried to be reassuring but it was sort of an experiment, too. What would happen if I didn’t make the effort to broadcast ‘I am totally not a threat’ to the amygdala of everyone around me. And what happened was… what happened. I tried to calm her down but I was late with the play, and it wasn’t that effective. She called you. I figured she would.”

“Yeah.” Jim struggled for conversation. “I suppose that offering you anything to eat or drink would be a waste of time?”

“I’m on a restricted diet these days. But help yourself. It might be a good idea for you.”

“Food at this time of night? I don’t think so.”

“I meant a beer, man. Alcohol. Booze.”

Jim’s hands lifted in dismissal. “I don’t keep it in the house anymore.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, Chief. Ah.” Jim studied Blair, who was leaning forward, elbows on his thighs; his gaze wandered the loft as if he’d never seen it before. “Why are you here?”

“You know, it’s kind of trippy.”

“What?” Jim asked patiently.

“The hyper-sense thing. Not that I have the taste/smell/touch thing so much, but sight and hearing? Definitely. And territory, I had theories on territory with you, and the pheromones, too. I’m pretty sure that the mind control stuff is partly pheromone based, but it’s kind of hard to do lab work in my current situation.”

“Why are you here, Chief?” Jim asked again.

“I wanted to see you. Come on, Constantin explained it all to you on that tape.”

Jim’s turn to not meet anyone’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Blair said. “Awkward. But hey, I’m not planning on making Cascade my permanent abode, so no harm, no foul. Constantin expects me back soon. This is like the first time Naomi sent me down to the grocery store on my own, it’s a rite of passage. But Constantin wants me back. Like a fucking kitty toy left under the couch.”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what? Making conversation?”

“Will you goddamn stop it!” Jim roared, and strode to Blair and hauled him up with a fisted grip in his clothes. He shook him.

Blair didn’t try to get away. He stood unresisting in Jim’s hold with his head bent and then, as Jim’s fury cooled, he silently but quite desperately put his arms around Jim’s waist and held on tight with his head buried against Jim’s shoulder. His hands were locked together and dug into the small of Jim’s back. Jim let go of Blair’s clothes and wrapped his own arms tight across Blair’s back. “Aw, god…” he said softly.

Blair was the one who let go first.

“Sorry. Sorry. I’ve got my coping mechanisms, but they’re not really appropriate here. Not that they work that well back there either.” He put one hand on Jim’s arm and gently steered him to sit back down on the couch, and then sat himself on the arm of it. Familiar, all of it, but Jim wasn’t eased. “I know you’ve been looking for me,” Blair said.

“Well, what did you expect?” Jim said curtly.

“Nothing that’s happened in the last twelve months, that’s for sure. Except that Jim Ellison would be a stubborn, loyal son of a bitch. That much I expected.”

Blair moved from the arm of the couch and walked a slightly meandering route to the kitchen, his fingers lightly draping across furniture, ornaments, the walls, as he went.

“I suppose you threw out my teas? They wouldn’t be any good now, but tell me you did at least think of drinking something that’s not 24/7 caffeine?’ He was ransacking Jim’s kitchen cupboards as he spoke.

“I’m not much of a man for tea,” Jim said.

“Nothing, god, not even some peppermint, you did actually like the peppermint. Aha!” He drew out a can of soup. “Better than nothing.”

“Sandburg, I’m not fucking hungry!”

“I know, but you’re probably in shock, and something hot would help you, and god knows most commercial cans of tomato soup are half sugar anyway, but you could do with that.”

“Chief…”

“Let me make the soup, Jim.”

Jim acquiesced with a small gesture. “Knock yourself out.”

Blair set about making the soup with methodical care, like he didn’t quite remember how to work everything. It was accomplished, and the soup was set on the table with a small plate of crackers (slightly stale) and a glass of water poured from a bottle in the fridge. Blair indicated that Jim should seat himself with a silly little maitre d’s’ flourish. Jim had to admit that the soup, and one of the crackers did steady him.

Blair sat at one end of the table and watched Jim eat and drink. “I… how have things been, Jim?”

“The usual. Catch criminals, try to track down vampires.”

Blair ignored this sarcasm. “Your senses?”

“Not so bad. I use them. They bother me sometimes, and Simon had to let Joel in on things. Those two keep an eye on me. There’s this crazy Australian woman attached to the department these days. She drives me nuts but I think that you’d like her.” Jim stared down at the remains of his meal. “Chief, is there any way I can help you?”

Something completely unreadable passed across Blair’s usually very open face, before he shook his head. “No. I appreciate the thought, but… no.” He fidgeted in his chair. “I mentioned a tape. When I was being an asshole before. You did get it?” His hands moved in a small, resigned gesture, acknowledging that yes, Jim no doubt had received a tape.

Memories swamped Jim, and the soup and crackers stirred uneasily in his stomach. He nodded.

“And you, uh, you watched it?” Shame sat heavily on Blair’s shoulders.

“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, you don’t have to be sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”

Jim looked down at the table, remembering watching Blair, the both of them trapped in Balan’s dirty games. “It wasn’t exactly your fault either.”

Blair shrugged. “I know, but strangely enough that doesn’t really make me feel any better about it. But it’s just the way it is. Right now. How it works with my… kind. Constantin made me, and I don’t get to say no to him, yet. Not for a couple of hundred years.”

“That’s a long time,” Jim said with humiliating banality.

“Tell me about it.” Blair grinned, but the smile was undercut by decidedly wincing body language. “If I’d had any say in the matter, it would be pretty amazing as an opportunity. The chance to take the long view. The history, the culture and the hierarchies going on with Constantin’s people. He kills most of his children once they hit the age of potential independence, unless he’s certain that he’s stockholmed them into loyalty. And it’s not just Constantin – there are other vampire communities out there. It’s actually really fascinating.” Blair stopped, aware that he’d been running off at the mouth.

“So what? You’re going to treat this like an expedition? You didn’t get to Borneo but this will do?” Jim asked viciously before he remembered what Blair had said earlier about coping mechanisms. Unfair to take someone’s feet out from under them like that. “Sorry. Sorry, I know it’s not like that.”

Blair averted his face against both the tirade and the apology, but then he rallied. “It’s okay. I know it must sound weird. It is weird, but what can you do?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. Blair was leaning the back of his hand against his mouth, as if to guard against any more betraying words. Jim looked at his hands, then at his own, resting against his table. “Tell me something. Would you have ever told me?”

“Told you what?” Blair asked before understanding broke.

“What you said on the tape. What he made you say. He made a big deal of how he was making you be so fucking honest, so I suppose it was all true.”

Once upon a time, that level of embarrassment on Blair’s face would have been accompanied by a scalding blush, but the skin stayed just a little paler than usual. Baselines. Jim reminded himself that Blair was stressed, that he had a right to be pale. 

“It was true. And no, I wouldn’t have told you.” It came out irritated, and then Blair paused a long, long moment. “I don’t know. Maybe. When I was drunk enough to be stupid, and you would have said, ‘sorry, Chief, I don’t swing that way’, and I could have plausibly said, no problemo, I’m only joking, ha-ha.”

Jim pushed back his chair slightly, and let his arms stretch out across the table. “You bring up a subject like that, you’d better think hard about plausibility, yeah. And if I’d said that maybe I could swing that way after all?”

Just as well that Blair wasn’t eating or drinking this evening, because from the look on his face he would have choked. “Jim. You’re only saying that because circumstances are what they are, man, you wouldn’t have said that if it was for real.”

“But what if I had?” said Jim, giddily reckless. “And you know something, Sandburg, I don’t think that things are going to get much more real than they are right now.”

“Well, presumably I would have taken you up on your kind offer,” Blair told him with considerable sarcasm.

“Well, here it is, Sandburg. I’m offering.”

For a moment, Blair sat inhumanly still, almost a statue even to Jim, whose acute vision could always detect the tiniest activity of a human body. And then he pushed back his chair and stood with an explosion of movement. “No! And fuck you for even suggesting it!”

He was angry, but the last twelve months and grotesque memories had worn Jim down to a sharp point of anger of his own – and Jim’s anger was usually a little quieter and always a lot more venomous than Blair’s. “If that’s what you want,” he said. Challenge, and he’d taken Blair’s feet out from under again and he didn’t give a damn. He stood, and walked towards Blair, who was poised on the balls of his feet, nervily on edge and familiar again in that helpless movement.

Blair spread his hands in an oddly placating gesture. “Think about this.”

“Why? So that we can talk ourselves out of a bad decision? The world is full of people making bad decisions, Chief. Why should this be any different?”

Blair was still wary. He backed away. “Think about why you’re saying this. You remember a little earlier in this lovely evening we’re having? When I was discussing pheromones?”

Jim laughed at that. “I think I know what pheromones feel like, Sandburg. Come on, the Blair I used to know would be champing at the bit.” Oh, Jim was going for the low blows tonight, and all the time there was that blue flame inside his gut that had everything to do with resentment and disappointment at the way that they were both of them so fucked, so very, very ruined. This should have been something different.

Jim closed the last few steps and gripped Blair’s upper arm. He lowered his head but Blair jerked his face away. “No!” His face quirked in odd apology. “Jim, the only thing that’s keeping us comfortably in the same room right now is the fact that I’m fooling a lot of your autonomic functions and you’re willing to let me. Let’s not strain it too much, huh. No kissing.”

The reminder didn’t do anything to cool that blue flame, but Jim managed a shrug. “Well, no kissing is supposed to be traditional, or so I got told back in the day.”

“Oh, such a seductive bastard. How can I fucking resist?” But Blair leaned upwards with a hand around the back of Jim’s head and for one startled moment Jim thought that Blair did intend to kiss him despite his protests. “There plenty of cultures that don’t actually kiss. Sexually or otherwise. I must have told you.” He pulled Jim down, gently, so that their noses and foreheads pressed together.

“Probably,” Jim said softly. “Or maybe I was asleep.” He curled his hands around Blair’s shoulders and tried to keep his fingers from digging hurtfully into the skin. Blair’s skin against Jim’s face was a little cold and his breath smelled... the way it should. Blair smelled the way he should, of familiar memories from mornings where he was fresh out of the bathroom, days and nights spent inside vehicles, the closeness of desperate consultation in times of trouble. 

Blair shifted slightly and nuzzled his way across Jim’s cheek, and then down to his neck, clearly inhaling Jim, taking in the scent of his body with slow care. “Oh.” It was almost a whimper. Then Blair looked him in the face, his blue eyes as bright as that goading flame inside Jim. “So, we go upstairs.”

“Sure,” Jim said and led the way up the stairs, feeling Blair’s gaze on him the way he might feel the knowledge of an aimed gun. He reached the bed and stood, waiting. “So how do you want me, Chief?”

Blair’s voice was steady and calm, and belied by the way that his fists clenched. “Take your clothes off. Not too fast.”

Jim smirked. “Always did like to watch, didn’t you?” He sat, and took off his shoes and socks and slid them, out of sight under the bed. Then he stood, and drew off his sweater. There was still wear in it, and he walked across the room and put it on the shelf. The long sleeved t-shirt he drew over his head and dropped in the hamper. The white undershirt followed, and he stood a moment, half-naked in his bedroom with another man. He took a slow breath and turned to face Blair, who leaned against Jim’s dresser. He met his friend’s eyes, and then looked away again. He’d never seen a look like that on Blair’s face ever. Grieved, and with more than a little anger underneath, but the surface was hunger, plain and desperate. Jim dropped his pants, and stepped out of them neatly enough and bent to pick them up. They could do another day, and he folded them over a hanger and put them away in the closet with hands that shook. 

Just his underwear left. He hooked his hands into the waistband and let them fall, and bent and put them in the hamper in their turn. Blair was utterly silent and Jim felt like a complete fool. He forced words to his mouth. “Like I said. How do you want me?”

“Lie down on the bed. On your front.”

Jim pulled back the covers and lay down, crossing his arms and resting his head there. He shut his eyes, and listened to the rustle of Blair undressing, and bit his lip at the dip of the mattress with Blair’s weight. He felt Blair lie beside him, and then flinched as a cool, gentle hand rested on the nape of his neck. It stayed there, both of them lying there in false silence. Jim’s heart beat crazily, and his breath caught, and there was a roaring in his ears.

“Jim. Don’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Blair caught him, wrestling him with only a moment’s awkwardness, strong, Jim had always known he was stronger than he might have looked, but this was new. Before he could be truly frightened he was in Blair’s arms, his head against Blair’s shoulder; his eyes were still shut. He coiled one arm around Blair’s waist and let the other rest snugged between Blair and the bedding, and tried to calm his breathing.

Blair’s free hand ran up and down his arm. “It’s okay, it’s okay, please, it’s okay.” A simple, dry kiss pecked against his forehead. “God, you… way to convince me that it’s really you. Jim Ellison, making a brave sacrifice. You drive me fucking crazy, you always did. What am I going to do with you?”

What Jim wanted to say was something dry and sarcastic, maybe something like “I’m sure you have an idea or two, Chief,” but his mouth was dry and his tongue trapped against the roof of his mouth. He pressed his face harder against Blair, and held on tighter, while Blair kept gently stroking him, and murmuring quiet, nonsense words of comfort.

Jim had to open his eyes eventually. He did so, pulling back from Blair’s hold. Blair was the one in trouble, and here was Jim clinging to him like a baby monkey. Pathetic. Blair’s hand came to rest on Jim’s jaw. “Do you want this, man?” Wanting a ‘yes’ so hard, but wanting the truth too. 

“I, uh, I don’t know,” Jim said, shamingly diffident after the bravado of before.

Blair nodded gravely, like this was no more than he’d expected. “Will you… will you let me?”

Jim thought about that moment. “Yes,” he said with a lot more certainty. 

Blair smiled with exasperated affection, but Jim saw something else flash in his eyes. Want. Hunger. “So, okay, I’m a visual kind of guy, and I just want to take in the view. That’s all, if you’d just go back the way you were, lie on your front.”

“Okay,” Jim said, and obeyed, settling himself once more. Blair moved and sat astride him and then Blair’s hands rested on his shoulders.

“This could still be me, you know,” he said softly.” I mean, you might _think_ that I’d want you to be some bottom slut, begging me for it, but there’s a part of me that could really get off on the blushing, unwilling virgin shtick.”

“Not blushing, not unwilling, Sandburg.”

A low chuckle, and no comment on what Jim hadn’t denied. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Jim. But don’t worry. I think I have a handle on this.” Another laugh. Blair always laughed when he was nervous. “If you know what I mean.”

“I’m sure you’ll explain,” Jim said. Those cool, careful hands explored him now, running from his shoulders along his upper arms, the touch firm and even pleasant. Jim relaxed a little. The hands came back to his shoulders and ran along his back. “You have a great back. I used to tell myself that I was just, I dunno, envious, or impressed. Wanting to emulate you. And what I wanted to do was this all along.” There was the touch of Blair’s mouth, of his tongue, kissing and licking a trail up and down Jim’s spine.

‘Because you were one quarter bi’ Jim did not say, but the memory of that awful tape intruded. He pushed it away. This was just Blair and Jim, trying something out. The last few years – nothing but one new thing tried out after another, why not this.

The kissing, the tingle of touched skin, was… nice.

Blair shifted down the bed, resting more against Jim’s knees. Those questing hands moved down Jim’s back and rested appreciatively on his ass. “This is cute, too,” Blair said teasingly.

“Yeah, sure,” Jim said.

“I used to wish you’d wear jeans more often. But no, you have to be the guy who thinks that the work casual dress code is actually a dress code.” Another kiss, this just at the base of the spine, and Jim gasped. “Are you getting into it, Jim? Not just something to endure?” It felt as if Blair were running the side of his fingers up the creases between buttock and thigh, and then his hands twisted, palms smoothing down Jim’s hips and fully onto his thighs. Blair shifted and his hands crossed the backs of the knees, Jim’s calves and back again. Blair’s hands rubbed again over Jim’s ass, careful but thorough, experiencing every available inch of skin but not forcing the cheeks apart. As non-threatening as a guy could be, Jim thought, when he was fondling your ass. The fondling ceased as an active thing – instead Blair’s hand rested, palmed across Jim’s ass, covering him. The coolness of Blair’s hand gradually warmed

The urge rose in Jim to shift, to crook one knee up the bed and expose himself further, but then Blair put his hand on Jim’s shoulder and tugged. “Turn over for me. Let’s have a look at the front view, huh?”

Jim went with it, shoving down the impulse to put his arm over his face. He turned, carefully, because those firm, exploratory touches had sparked something sexual and he was half-hard at least.

Blair was fully erect, and Jim swallowed and took a good look. It was uncomfortably easier than looking Blair in the face and seeing whatever might be there. Blair leaned alongside Jim, slipping an arm under Jim’s neck, and lowered his mouth to one fast-puckering nipple. Jim unconsciously arched into the touch, while Blair made a soft, approving noise. His hair was coming loose, untidy strands of it partly veiling his face. He shifted and sat astride Jim again with unexpected, unsettling speed and lowered his mouth to suck and kiss at Jim’s skin. Nipples, chest, shoulders, collar-bone. He nuzzled the side of Jim’s neck, inhaling like Jim was a fine wine to be sampled, and a cold wave rode Jim’s skin. Fear. It didn’t reduce his growing arousal, not at all. If anything he was harder, and more aware of sensation. Colours in the quiet room were more saturated, the sounds of their bodies and the world around them more distinct. Intense and ambiguous shivers ran over Jim’s skin; touch was something that ran from surface to his core, and wanted an ending. 

Blair lifted his head and looked into Jim’s eyes and smiled. The room was lit, not brightly true, but his eyes were a predator’s glowing lambently in the dark, and Jim’s heart nearly broke out from his ribs. He wanted to leap off the bed with limbs wrung hollow by adrenaline and run. He wanted to come. Blair moved, and Jim’s cock rubbed against Blair’s ass, and the sensation forced a cry out of Jim. Everything was strung too tightly, and he wanted to be touched. How didn’t matter. He twisted and arched his neck, hands clawing into his sheets, and waited.

Blair’s wild, delighted smile only broadened; and Jim resigned himself as prey had done so many times before.

“Oh, that’s my good Jim,” Blair murmured. “So good.” He laid himself on the bed by Jim’s left side and held Jim’s balls with exquisite care, rubbing his thumb along the space between each sac. “Yeah,” he said softly, and took Jim’s cock in his mouth, and slowly, so very slowly took him all the way down. With the same maddening care, he withdrew, and weighted Jim down with hands and body before taking him down again.

“Jesus,” Jim muttered, trying to thrust.

“Nuh-uh, man, you can stay still and let me enjoy this.” Not that Jim had any choice in his obedience. Blair held him in place with that unexpected strength, and deep-throated him like a pro. Jim hadn’t had a blow-job like this in years, maybe never. Blair didn’t seem to need to breathe - but Jim pushed that thought out on the cold tide that he increasingly found himself surrendering to. Maybe Blair’s control was slipping, or maybe Jim’s was growing, but it didn’t matter. Blair simply moved, back and forth, relentless, and Jim had no doubts and no thoughts except that he wanted this. Blair made little noises in the back of his throat that vibrated on Jim’s flesh. Jim didn’t think they were for his pleasure. They were only Blair enjoying himself, and that was fine, that was good, didn’t Blair deserve something good?

“Chief,” he begged. Don’t stop. Are you sure? I’m going to come. There were no words or breath for any of it, and he came with a few desperate, abject noises, inside Blair’s mouth. Blair stayed there, mouthing gently at Jim’s increasingly sensitive cock until finally he let go. Orgasm had loosened only a little tension, and Jim flailed with one hand, resting it on Blair’s neck.

“Blair,” he said.

Blair looked up at him from his place further down the bed, and rubbed the back of one finger along the seam of his closed lips. It wasn’t a gesture of regret or disgust, just… thoughtful. Then he moved again, more graceful than Jim remembered, and sat astride Jim’s torso once more. He was still hard, and he took his cock in one hand. The other, his right hand, he placed against Jim’s chest, right over the heavy beat of Jim’s heart, slightly clawed as if he’d like to reach under Jim’s skin. 

“Look at me,” Blair commanded with serene and absolute authority, and Jim did. He locked his eyes with Blair as his friend jerked off. Jim judged the end by Blair breaking their gaze and bowing his head. He whimpered, and hunched over Jim’s body as if he was in pain but there was no semen. Then Blair was still again, but his hand still rested on Jim’s chest. “Oh,” Blair said. “Oh, man,” and now Jim caught an edge of panic in his voice. Regret, too.

“Come here,” he said, and pulled Blair down, both of them bouncing against the good springs of Jim’s mattress as they adjusted themselves to lie in what might have been comfort in any other circumstances.

“Do you know how many symbolisms there are around taking part of another person’s body into yourself?” Blair’s voice was muffled against Jim’s skin and the pillow.

Jim bent his arm to stroke carefully at Blair’s hair, before he applied both hands to undoing the elastic containing his ponytail, which straggled even more from its previous austere control. “Just make this the Cliff’s Notes version, will you?”

Blair’s body shuddered with soundless laughter. “I can’t think of even a Cliff’s Notes version that wouldn’t sound creepy as hell.” He pushed himself up onto his elbows, while Jim laid the elastic on the night stand. “Are you okay?”

“I just got a great blow job, Sandburg. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

Blair nodded, unconvinced but going along. “Sure. Sure. You’re completely right,” he said, and lay down again, his neck cradled on Jim’s arm once more. They lay there, and Jim thought nothing, felt nothing except for Blair’s weight against him, and the long strands of hair that Jim strung through his fingers.

“Your hair smells like dirt.” It came out of some over-tired, spacey place and Jim regretted it as soon as he spoke, not least because Blair flinched down his entire body and made to get out of bed.

“Ah. Sorry, sorry, I thought I’d washed properly, but yeah, sentinel. I should have known better.”

“Why would your hair smell like dirt?” Jim asked. Stupid, Ellison. Stupid, stupid. He grabbed at Blair’s forearm.

Blair shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s a daylight thing, or rather the lack of daylight, needing a lack of daylight. Improvised shelter. To be honest, I was kind of relieved it worked. I was half expecting Mother Earth to spit me out.”

Jim’s gaze strayed to Blair’s fingernails. Clean, carefully scrubbed, but now that he knew he could see the line of dirt. That was as far into the mechanics of the thing as his mind was prepared to dwell. “Well, she didn’t kick you out, and I’m not doing it either. Stay here a while longer.” Jim tugged at Blair’s arm. “Come on.”

“How can you stand it?” Blair asked. “There’s weird shit happening with your vital signs, Jim. I may not have your senses but I’m more in touch with that sort of thing than I used to be. Almost like a sentinel, but not quite.” He sounded miserable, and Jim swallowed hard.

“I don’t know. Some of your persuasion is holding. And the longer you’re here, maybe the less it has to hold. You’re still Blair.” Blair ducked his head at that, but he came back to lie next to Jim.

“What comes next, Chief?”

“Nothing much. I’ll go before daybreak, and that’s it. You won’t see me again.”

“What if I want to see you?” Jim said, rolling on his side to stare into Blair’s face. He knew that expression, the ‘shut up and let me talk’ face.

“Jim, I know that you’re actually a perceptive, insightful kind of guy who can draw the lines from some conversational dots. I’ve told you the hold Constantin has over me. I’m not fucking around about that. This has been an exercise – if I prove I can survive out in the big bad world then I can be of use to Constantin outside of being his fucktoy; that’s why he let me go, aside from guessing I’d come to you and twisting the knife about that.”

“And Constantin likes twisting the knife,” Jim said quietly.

“He’s over five hundred years old. He gets bored.”

“Give me the bastard, I’d do a little knife twisting myself.” It was a viciously earnest assurance.

Blair grinned at that, but Jim could tell he was being humoured. “I’d cheer you on, man, truly.” He caressed Jim’s cheek. “But it’s not going to happen that way.”

“You’re going to leave again.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“When?”

“Before daybreak.”

“I can’t build you, I dunno, a really thorough pillow fort?”

Jim expected another grin, or even a laugh, but instead Blair looked stricken. He recovered. “It’s a nice thought, man, but no. Thanks, though.” He leaned across and kissed Jim’s forehead. Another wave of prickly cold ran over Jim’s skin but he endured it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the delay here, but it's done, for good or ill. This is the section that applies the suicide and major character death tags. Brace yourself.

“Hey,” Blair said. “It’s rising four. I’ll make you some coffee.”

“Fine, Sandburg, make me some coffee.”

Blair grabbed Jim’s old grey robe and belted it loosely and went downstairs. Jim chose to put on most of his clothes again, retrieving them all from their places and went barefoot down to his living room, dressed, if dirty. Blair was standing over the coffee maker. Every now again his nose twitched, and he smiled as Jim came over to him. “God, I miss coffee. Even the scent of it.” He had a few beans in his hands and rubbed them between his palms with obsessive fascination, before finally dropping them on the counter and pouring Jim a cup. They sat back down at the table, and Jim stared into his cup and inhaled the aromas. Sharp, roasted richness of the coffee and the blander oiliness of the cream masked the unwashed smell of his own body. Blair perched on one hip on the table and watched Jim drink with an attention that Jim presumed he’d given to exotic, alien rituals in the past.

“I have a favour to ask you,” Blair said. “Once it’s an hour or so into daylight I want you to go up on the roof, and if I’ve left anything there can you, uh, tidy up after me?

“Like old times,” Jim said, pleasantry lying over growing, sick suspicion. “What are you going to be doing up on the roof anyway?”

Blair’s jaw set, and there was a long silence before he finally spoke. “Taking a look at my first sunrise in over a year.”

Jim carefully set the coffee aside. “Yeah, you wouldn’t be digging a hole in the dirt on my roof, that’s for sure.”

Blair stood and moved away from the table. His back was to Jim. “Don’t start with me, man.”

“Don’t start what?” Jim protested. “Don’t start trying to talk you down like a jumper on the Green Street Bridge?” The coffee sat queasily in his stomach, and a new horror gently crawled over his skin and lifted the hair on the back of his neck. “You’re not even willing to look me in the face about this, are you?” Blair’s hands clenched into tight, white-knuckled fists, just the same way that Jim’s were clenched. Old, pointless reflexes came to the fore. “Never figured you for a quitter, Sandburg.”

Blair turned then. Jim had seen that sort of deliberation in bar fights and more formal violent undertakings - the look of someone about to do something regrettable but inevitable. He opened his mouth to speak and then there was a turmoil of movement and Jim was pinned against the pillar in the kitchen. He’d never even seen Blair move. Blair’s hands were locked around his arms and his knee pressed between Jim’s thighs. Jim couldn’t, quite literally couldn’t, look away from him. His awareness was pinned as surely as his body.

“Never figured you for an idiot, Ellison. Take a look. Take a good look and know what I am!” Blair snarled.

The insubstantial veil, the little tricks, the mind games dropped away. Jim, with Blair’s help, had set two compartments in place, one marked ‘monster’ and the other marked ‘Blair. Now there was no separation, and deep instincts in Jim’s mind and body flinched and howled in unconstrained terror.

Except that it was still Blair, and long ago Jim had been trained to do things that terrified him. He looked down into the face of the monster and sought for and found his friend. “I know what you are,” he rasped, controlling the urge to cough (to expel poison) with a sharp, painful effort. 

As quickly as it had come, the fit of fury passed. Blair started to shake, and then he almost fell backwards, as if Jim’s body had been a high voltage wire that he’d unthinkingly grabbed.

Blair’s borrowed robe had come undone in the speed and power of his movement, and he drew it back around himself with hands that kept on shaking. Jim stayed leaning against the pillar, needing the solidity of it at his back. Blair dropped heavily to sit on the floor. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Sorry.” His voice grew louder. “But this is my fucking point. Did I do that because I’m changing and it’s natural to be cruel, or did I do it because I’m still Blair and I am so fucking angry and taking it out on you?” His fist pounded the floor with a sledgehammer weight behind it that sent vibration running through the boards to Jim’s bare feet. “I don’t know, and I hate it, I hate it!”

“It’s okay, Sandburg,” Jim said.

The attempted reassurance got him a smile that was only passably sane. “Yeah, and that’s why you’re cowering in your home, because everything is hunky-dory.” Blair stood. “Oh, god, talk about conflicted. I know I should go, I must be driving you crazy. But I don’t want to go. Jim, I really don’t want to.”

Jim pushed himself to stand properly upright. “It’s only,” – he glanced at his watch – “4.30. It’s another few hours until sun-up. You might as well make the most of the occasion. We haven’t seen each other for a while.”

“Oh my god, you _are_ crazy.”

“You’ve done it at last, and what does it matter anyway?” Jim walked past Blair out to the balcony. “Come out here, and just explain to me, okay? I won’t try to stop you, but just come out and talk to me.”

Blair spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “It won’t make any difference, but sure.” He followed Jim, and when he joined him outside he had an afghan from the couch. “Put it around yourself. The cold won’t bother me, but you’ll freeze.”

Jim wrapped the blanket around himself, and sat in one of the wooden deck chairs. Blair leaned on the parapet, looking out over the bay. He was silent and unnervingly still.

“So talk, Chief,” Jim said tiredly. It was easier outside – the fresh, brisk air of the Cascade night diluted some of the signals that Blair’s body sent to Jim, and the unreasoning fear saw in the open space a way of escape, even if it was only over the edge. Jim huddled more deeply into the chair, anchoring himself there.

“What’s there to talk about? I’m not going back to Constantin because two hundred years as his almost literal butt-monkey is, it’s just…” Blair leaned his face into his palm. “Not acceptable. Let’s call it that. Constantin is making me over, Jim. He calls us his children, but that’s not what we are. We’re hosts, and I have a limited window of time left to be Blair Sandburg, and make the kind of choices that Blair Sandburg would make.” He raised his head once more and turned it to look Jim in the face. His voice broke. “And I’ve got a right, Jim! I’ve got a right to choose, while I still can.”

Jim nodded, calmly holding Blair’s gaze. “I just need to know that this is the only choice you can make. That there isn’t any other choice.”

Blair looked at him, slowly shaking his head. “Jim, I’ve thought about this, I have struggled with it, against it. If there’s one thing that Constantin’s made very clear to me, it’s that I don’t get to say no while I still care, and there will come a point when I don’t care. But I do care now, and I’ve been studying. I think that’s one reason Constantin picked me. He had scholastic leanings when he was still human, and because I’m his baby he was willing to indulge me. It’s all sort of weird, you don’t need to know the details and Constantin wouldn’t let me tell you the really interesting stuff anyway.”

“So what’s the interesting stuff?” Blair was apparently comfortable just in the light robe. Jim was growing aware that he should have put his shoes and socks on.

“Oh, history and biology of vampires. The location of other vampire coteries. Things that people who don’t like vampires would find useful. He made a point of telling me that I couldn’t tell you.” Blair rubbed a hand against his chest, as if something pained him. “But the thing is, he didn’t know that there are other things I’d found out, and so, he couldn’t…” Blair swallowed hard. He looked ill, and Jim rose from his chair, concerned. A half-smile, half-grimace crossed Blair’s face. “He couldn’t tell me not to tell you, so I…” He dropped to his knees, his hands still digging into the parapet edge. “Jude Lane in Los Angeles.” He rasped the name out like he was vomiting. “Jude Lane. Oh, god.” He still clung to the edge, his face pressed against the parapet side, and Jim clumsily untangled himself from the blanket and knelt beside Blair and took his shoulder.

“Blair. Are you okay? Sandburg!”

Blair’s hands slid down and he sat back on his heels, hand around his gut, his forehead pressed to the concrete parapet. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay, that was not good but it’s passing.” He looked at Jim’s hand on his shoulder. “Man, you are getting used to this, aren’t you?”

Jim nodded. “Looks like it.” He made no mention of his own queasy stomach, but instead sat quietly, his back against the parapet. He could see the loft in front of him, warmer and more comfortable than this spot. He stayed where he was. “I’ll check the name out. Later.”

Blair bit his lip. Clearly even thinking about it caused him distress, but he nodded decisively. “Yeah.”

Blair joined Jim in sitting with his back to the parapet side. “I made a promise to myself.”

“What was the promise?” 

“Never in Cascade. I won’t hurt people in your city, Jim. But what happens a few years down the track, when it’s nearly all Constantin’s child inside me, but there’s just enough of Blair left to know what he wants, and what he wants is Naomi Sandburg and Jim Ellison? I couldn’t turn you, that’s for the old ones, but like I said before. Upstairs. Symbolism.” Blair shrugged. “There are tribes that consume their dead loved ones, for memory’s sake. I’ve been smelling your blood all night, even though I made sure…” He huddled his knees up closer to his body. “I don’t have to drink _human_ blood. It’s one of those things that you really don’t need to know the details about.”

“What about Constantin?” Jim asked, unwillingly fascinated and, armed with the name that Blair had given him, actively seeking information. Intelligence. Witness statements. You needed to know, before you could take action.

“Constantin,” Blair swallowed. “He can’t drink from people without turning them, but he’s way too high class to drink animal blood. So we drink instead, human blood of course, and he takes it from us. Or we – those homeless people. Constantin never drinks… wine” – Blair put a Bela Lugosi lilt on his voice – “but he can sure as fuck hold a wineglass.”

“Jesus,” Jim murmured.

Blair turned to him with a heart-breaking smile. “Like I said. Never in your city. Not by me. But there are only so many ways to make sure of that.”

And they were back to Blair’s plans for daybreak. Jim rubbed his hands over his face, but he couldn’t wipe away this moment, or Blair’s quiet voice laying out his intentions.

“I don’t want to. Everything wants to live.”

Then live, Jim didn’t say. But he understood Blair’s desire to work it out, to make a decision that he truly believed was his choice, after a year of Balan making Blair play ugly games.

“But I’ve worked it all out, and I think it’s the best choice. And that’s all I want now, Jim. The best choice I can make.” The full mouth thinned in a satisfied smirk. “Cascade is nine hours behind where… where Constantin is. The bastard is asleep right now, and oh, god, it’s been so long. It’s been the best thing about travelling – finally having him out of my head.”

“How did you get here?” Jim asked.

“Can’t tell you that.”

“Ah. Sorry, Chief.”

“S’okay.” Blair turned to Jim. “You’re freezing. Go inside and have a shower. I’m not going anywhere without telling you. I promise.”

Jim nodded and stood. It was still full dark, but that would change. Sunrise, sunset, the earth spinning through the void. None of that was going to stop for Jim Ellison and Blair Sandburg. He took a shower, not bothering to wash himself but simply standing under the hot water while steam rose around him and coated the walls and the mirror. When he was warm, if only on the surface, Jim dressed again in the old clothes, thinking that he would go and get some socks, not the plain white cotton athletic socks that Blair had teased him about more than once, but some thick, woollen socks that he used when camping sometimes. He felt sick with disgust at the way that mundane life asserted itself when you least expected it.

There was no sign of Blair when he stepped out of the foggy bathroom, and Jim whirled around in a panic, despite Blair’s earlier assurances. Then he caught the small thud from Blair’s old room and went to the door. Blair was kneeling on the floor, sorting through a box of books. He looked up at Jim, a heavy hardback with some incomprehensible title clutched in both hands.

“Your mother…” Jim cleared his throat. “She took some of your things. Said that she’d look after them for you. And I…”

“You knew I wasn’t coming back, Jim. It’s okay. I didn’t expect you keep this place like a shrine. I’m kind of glad you didn’t. There is enough ritual creepiness in my life back in Europe, trust me.” Jim decided that he wouldn’t disturb Blair’s misconception. There had been a great deal of what Blair would have regarded as ‘ritual creepiness’ in Jim’s slow, painstaking deconstruction of this room. “Hey, you still have the monograph.” He looked at it, flicking carefully through the pages, before placing it on the dresser where he’d found it. “You can do what you like with this. I don’t need it anymore.”

Jim turned away at that, and went into sit on the couch. It was just after five, and sunrise was around seven this time of year. In everyday reflex, he turned on the tv, mindlessly flipping channels until he settled on some shopping network. A perky, busty blonde woman was extolling the glow that her new mineralised foundation powder would give to the user’s skin and Jim stared at the screen with numb exhaustion.

The cushions shifted as Blair sat down at the other end, his back to the arm of the couch, Jim’s robe tucked neatly around him.

“Are you okay?” A brief gesture of hands. “Stupid question, I know, sorry.”

“No, not okay, Chief.” Jim kept his eyes on the light and colour of the screen. “Are you still going to do this thing?”

There was no pause now that the subject had been broached and discussed. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“How do you know it’ll work? How many eyewitnesses can you have, in the circumstances?”

Blair’s voice came clear and steady over the chatter of the television. “Well, there are centuries of report and tradition. And think about what you’re watching right now. Modern technology and vengeful motherfuckers on both sides? It’s a beautiful and informative thing.”

So steady. Jim took a deep breath and said matter-of- factly, “I’ll stay on the roof with you.”

Not so steady now. “Jim. You don’t have to do that.”

Jim looked at Blair then. Blair still huddled in the corner of the couch, and his eyes were enormous. Jim looked him up and down and then looked away, gazing past the tv screen to the wall. “Constantin made me watch before – the Cascade Grande, that damn tape. Maybe I’m like you, maybe I want a choice at the end. And if I choose to come up on the roof with you then that’s my business and nobody else’s, not even yours.”

Another silence from Blair. “Is this some reverse psychology thing?” He sounded genuinely bewildered. “Because if it is it’s not going to work.”

“If you can stand to do it then I can stand to watch.”

There were no more protests. Blair shuffled his way along the couch and laid his predator’s head on Jim’s shoulder while the tv screen blurred in front of Jim’s eyes. They sat there an untold time, silent and unmoving, until a completely involuntary tremor went through Jim and Blair moved again to sit quietly back on the other side of the couch.

When he spoke again, his voice was low but calm. “If you don’t want to keep the Burton monograph, take it to a reputable book dealer, will you? It was a lucky find in a yard sale when I was fifteen, and when I found out how much it was worth I nearly fell out of my chair. Don’t get ripped off, okay?”

Jim turned himself, back to the other arm of the couch, and nodded. They eyed each other across the space in final negotiation. “No Sandburg, I won’t get ripped off,” Jim said in a tone of blank obedience that made Blair frown in obvious worry. He examined Jim for brief while and fired off salvo number two.

“And talk to someone about the senses. You need back-up, Jim. It’s important.”

“No zoning. Check.”

“Jim, are you actually registering what I’m saying, because I’m serious about this!”

“I know. I know you are,” Jim said more gently, but his gut roiled in denial. He knew that people had these conversations. People left. They sought new starts, new places, they acknowledged the end of struggles with illness, but he still couldn’t quite accept the necessity of these every day, awkward concerns.

“Okay, okay, just so long as you do know.” 

It was a quarter of six.

Jim had done death watches before. His beloved grandmother died when he was seventeen, and he’d sat with her, heavy with the adult responsibility of it. Two of his Ranger team besides him survived the helicopter crash, one unconscious, the other in great pain. He’d waited with Incacha when one of his children took a fever that burned out the tiny body. He knew what the wait felt like, the slow, stretched minutes that sped too fast towards inevitability.

“Blair…” He tried one last appeal, but Blair only shook his head.

“I’m peaceful right now, and I don’t want to fight and I won’t change my mind. Let it be, man. Please.”

“Okay,” Jim said softly. “Okay.” He shut his eyes, and then forced himself to look once more. “What do you want me to tell your mother?”

Blair smiled an odd, tremulous smile. “Oh, god, that’s a question that I don’t know the answer to. I didn’t want to put you in this position, Jim. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’m still glad that you came back, Chief.” Jim shrugged. “I’ll think of something. We both know that she knows something isn’t right. I don’t think that she’ll be surprised by anything that I tell her.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

They sat in quiet, patient limbo while the time counted down, made quiet small talk. Blair asked after Simon and the Major Crimes crew. Jim made himself some more coffee and then Blair indicated that it was time. Jim dressed warmly, in contrast to Blair who led the way up the stairs to the roof still wearing Jim’s old bathrobe. Jim’s eyes took him all in on the narrow stairs – the broad shoulders, the pale, hairy legs, the touch of a callus on the sole of his heel. Everything about him looked so human, so normal despite the senses’ protests. How did that all work, Jim wondered, and felt regret for things about Blair that he was never going to know.

The city was waking up all around them, the low traffic hum and wet street hiss of Cascade on a November day. Blair shifted to see Jim’s face and took off the robe and handed it to Jim. Jim twisted his hands in it (and it seemed some dreadful personal injury that there was barely any body heat in the cloth) and wished there was something to lean on up here. He felt faint, but he dragged some words up from an unknown well.

“So, is this symbolic, Sandburg?”

Blair grinned, but his eyes showed nothing but strain. “Naked I came into the world, naked will I go out of it. Although I can’t make many claims to being an upright man.”

Jim’s face must have shown his incomprehension.

Blair shrugged. “Yeah, symbolism. Also, practicality.”

“If you’re being so practical, why did you have to choose the sun in _Cascade_?” His voice dragged roughly in his throat.

Blair’s cold hand rested on Jim’s cheek – gentle and wrong-feeling. “It’ll be enough - I can’t explain it, it’s one of those things that I’m really not supposed to talk about, but it’ll be enough. It won’t take long, you don’t have to worry but you should keep your distance, Jim. This is unknown chemical reactions time, okay?”

Jim nodded his understanding and unwilling agreement.

“I love you,” Blair said. Jim nodded his understanding of that too, and tried to say it back, but he opened his mouth and nothing came out. Blair only nodded in his turn, a small, knowing smile on his face, and then he turned away.

The view from Jim’s safe, warm apartment looked eastwards over the sound to the city on the other side. Blair stood, naked in the cold, early morning air and walked to the western side of the roof and sat facing the sound (and Jim), cross-legged the way he use to sit in meditation. He might have seen the hills and the mountains beyond – if it wasn’t for the angle of the roof and the parapet and the city on the other side of the bay, if it wasn’t for the overcast that let fall a drizzle that moistened Jim’s face. The dull light gradually increased, paling the cityscape electric glow around them, and Blair sat quietly, so quietly that Jim might have thought the day had no effect. But for all Blair’s silent stillness that preternaturally steady heartbeat began to increase, until it thrummed like a trapped bird’s. Jim was listening, of course he was, just as he’d listened a year ago.

“Blair?” he called softly. There was no answer. “Blair, you with me?”

“Yeah.” It came out curt and rough, and then Blair said, “Hurts, Jim,” and jammed the side of one hand into his mouth and bit down. Jim could see teeth deeply pierce flesh, but there was no blood. In all the greyness around them, there was still growing colour and light – the sheen on the concrete, the distinction of bricks and their mortar, and the paling orange and white of the street and building illumination. From Jim’s place on the roof he could see the rise of the road and the red of the traffic lights two blocks away. But there was no colour in Blair – everything that was colour and life leeched away as the fall light grew. He sat at the side of the roof marked out in black and white and grey. A muffled scream came out of him, and Jim rose and strode across the roof, saying urgently, ‘Hang on, hang on, Chief, I’m here, dammit, Blair you said it’d be quick! Blair!”

A time not even so long ago came to him. Blair in the PD parking garage, out of his mind and hallucinating, determined to save everyone from the monsters only he could see. 

The streetlights blinked out and left the dawn light. There were no more cries, and there were no more heartbeats. Blair’s hair fell away, grey dust on the ground, and then the rest of him followed in slow collapse, gone. You think they’re ashes but they’re alive, Jim thought. 

Only not. Only not.

~*~

The search for Jude Lane went better when Jim realised that he was looking for Judith Lane, and he now drove the wet streets of a Los Angeles neighbourhood that was mainly a mix of Black and Latino households. Parking his rental car in front of the address he’d been given, he was aware of stares from a few windows. He wondered if that was because he didn’t fit the neighbourhood, or if there was a general suspicion of Lane’s visitors.

Jude Lane lived on the first floor of an old house that had been divided into apartments. The ground in the front yard was laid with cracked but weed-free concrete and two tubs overflowing with daisies lay alongside a waist high chain link fence. The front door was open and Jim climbed the stairs to the first door past the landing, ignoring the odours of stale food and stale pot smoke that surrounded him. Then he took a deep breath and knocked at the door. It opened.

Lane’s voice over the phone had been deep but with a husk to it, like she was on the verge of a cold. In person, she was of medium height, and her hair was caught in a mass of complicated braids. She was heavy at the hip but the forearm that rested on the door jamb was sinewy and strong looking. It was the eyes that made Jim think that he maybe wasn’t wasting his time, despite the unpromising neighbourhood and house. They were steady and curious and unimpressed. 

“You’d better come in,” she said.

The apartment was cluttered but carefully kept, filled with old furniture and plants in containers.

“Coffee?” Lane asked. Jim declined and sat at the dining table chair that she indicated. She sat also, and looked across the table at Jim. “So who gave you my name, Detective Ellison?”

“A friend,” Jim said. Using his police rank indicated that she’d done her homework after he’d called, because all he’d said to the point over the phone was that Balan didn’t want him to know her name. It had been enough to get him this visit.

“A friend. Huh.” She rested her chin on her knuckles and looked at Jim across her table. It was spread with a dull cream cloth hand embroidered with big pink roses. “What do you want with me, Detective Ellison?” She spread the word ‘detective’ out, breaking the syllables up with little hints of derision.

“I want to know if you can help me get Balan. If you can, then we have something to talk about. If you can’t, then I‘ll go.”

“And what does ‘getting’ Balan actually mean? You want to put your shiny police issue cuffs on him?”

Jim’s voice came out with smooth calm, like he was ordering off the menu in a nice restaurant. “I want to kill the bastard son of a bitch, _Ms_ Lane. What do you think I’d want to do with him?”

“Because he took your friend. Blair Sandburg.”

Jim nodded sharply, calm deserting him at the name. “If you know I’m a cop, then knowing that isn’t much of a stretch.”

Lane nodded and then reached for a shelf behind her and offered Jim a framed, recent picture of herself and man of about thirty-five. They had their arms around each other, and a touch of red-eye from the flash of the camera. “That’s my grand-daddy, Everett Lane.”

Jim looked at the picture and a surge of red rage ran through him. “You look very happy together,” he said flatly and stood, ready to leave.

“And see, there you are assuming,” Lane said, and the unlikely mix of scorn and sympathy made Jim pause. “Were you expecting Jude Lane, vampire hunter?”

Jim leaned on the table on clenched fists, sick with the waning flash of fury and the lost hope that had brought him here. “Yes, I suppose I was. And that was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”

Lane’s smile was rueful. “It’s always complicated. Why don’t you sit down again?”

Jim did, unwilling but aware that he was shaky with adrenalin. 

“The first thing you need to know is that Balan is a bad seed.”

“Giving all those other bloodsuckers a bad name,” Jim murmured, and an unexpected flash of humour crossed Lane’s face.

“Close enough. And I get angry about that, because of Everett, and because of Esther.”

“And who’s Esther?”

“Esther is the queen of Los Angeles,” Lane said with complete assurance and considerable challenge.

Jim looked her in the eye and said “And Balan is the king of some pissant spot in Europe somewhere.”

Lane nodded. “Because they’re all territorial. They lay their boundaries and they don’t interfere none, unless they have a reason and an excuse.”

‘Unless they have to.’ Jim recognised the crux of the matter. “And what would make another king or queen interfere?”

Lane didn’t answer that. “Balan’s been a pain in everyone’s ass for years.” She paused. “I said that Balan took your friend, and that’s what happened, isn’t it? He saw something pretty and he put out his hand and he took it.”

Jim made a short sound of agreement.

“My grand-daddy…. Everett went to Esther and he begged her. I don’t know how he knew her, but he begged her, because he’d watched his wife die young and die hard, and she agreed. Esther’s no fool, and she doesn’t make children out of people who don’t want it. No sane vampire does that.”

“So Balan is insane.”

“And dangerous. They all get that the world is changing, and they all have their ways of dealing with that. And Balan’s way is try to obtain footholds. New territories. If your friend can survive, then he’ll stake out Cascade for Balan.” It appeared to genuinely concern her.

‘Not in your city.’ Blair had told him the risk so far as he could. “No. Blair isn’t going to stake out anything for Balan.”

Lane stared into his face, and there was the first sign of sympathy, and also relief. “Chose the day, did he?”

“If that means that he killed himself, then yes. That’s what he chose.” Jim stuttered, barely, over the ‘killed’. He’d come here from Naomi’s current home, and left her cradling the wooden box that was everything left of her son.

“Brave man,” Lane said. “I’m sorry. Not many choose that, even Balan’s get. They go wrong right from the start. I assumed things some myself when you came here.”

“What did you assume?” Jim sounded even more tired than he felt. He wasn’t going to get what he’d hoped for, but there was still a dull curiosity, a need to know what had shaped Blair’s decision.

“That maybe you were your friend’s puppet, come here to get my sympathy and access to Esther.”

Jim was genuinely intrigued at that. “So why see me? Why talk to me? I could be lying about – about Blair.”

She smiled at that, and shook her head. “Oh, you can’t know but trust me. Vampires have got their tricks but pretending that they’re dead? That ain’t one. Vampires are all about territory, and claiming it. They stand up proud and they declare it. It’s just how they are.”

The glimmering of an idea came to Jim. “So you could help me? Find Balan?”

“Not without Esther’s permission. She hates what Balan stands for, but he walks a line that makes him hard to deal with. He might not be sane but he’s not stupid either.”

“What if Balan was trying to take over territory that somebody already had staked out?”

“Humans don’t have territory, not as vampires see it.” But there was a spark of interest in Lane’s eyes, and Jim remembered Balan’s gloating in the Cascade Grande. A treasure of the earth, he had named Jim. Maybe it had been a simple taunt, an excuse that his children would understand, but Jim had a feeling that maybe, just maybe, he had a lever, something that could undo that unwilling neutrality that the woman across the table had hinted at. And if he was wrong? Blair had made it clear that he couldn’t go it alone, and god, Jim needed to tell somebody all the truth.

“Blair is – Blair was an anthropologist. He was studying me. He called me a sentinel….”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're friended to my LJ/DW, you've probably guessed what I'm working out here. There's a reason I use an icon that claims fanfic as therapy on those sites. Thank you for your patience, and if you've come to the end of this story, then I can only hope that you enjoyed the naked flailings of my id.


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